Emerging media from the borderlands of Jewish identity

Jewishness

I’m curious about the “qualifications” of being Jewish. I have always thought of myself as Jewish but I know very little about Jewish culture. I don’t celebrate the religion. I feel strange being the end of Jewishness in my family — my grandmother identified strongly as a Jew and my father less so, but is still quite connected to it. It turns out, because my grandmother’s blood father wasn’t Jewish, I’m only an eighth Jewish, barely at all. It’s funny to think about… my grandmother fled the Holocaust and left journals and stories about it. It had a huge effect on our family.

I know people have really different ideas about what makes them Jewish. Is the definition still that your mother has to be Jewish?

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Hi Kate,
Yes, officially your mother must be Jewish for you to be considered Jewish by the rabbinical authorities.
But ofcourse you can practice the religion and traditions as you wish.
Also you can study and become an official Jew through a rabbi.
Best,
Raya

Starting out with the big question – the biggest question of all, that’s been on Jewish minds throughout history….glad you’re not afraid to tackle it….

I think that the answer is (not surprisingly) very complicated, and is particularly so because of the way that Jews act at times both like a religious group and like a people. This is, in certain ways, because of how old it is: in the ancient world, it wasn’t strange to say that a people and a religion were identical. But, as history went on, this became, generally speaking, divorced from one another: Christians don’t have to be of any one people, they just have to (largely speaking) believe in the tenets of Christianity and act according to those rules or tenets. (I’m speaking generally, but this is the gist.) To be a Jew, on the other hand, you have to be part of the Jewish people. And if you are, then (again, this is generally true, though there are always exceptions), then it doesn’t really matter – as far as *being* a Jew is concerned – what you believe and what you do. (Some people might say that you’re not a particularly *good* Jew if you do this or don’t do that, but they wouldn’t disagree that if you were part of the Jewish people, you were a Jew – whereas if you weren’t part of the Jewish people, then you could be as punctiliously observant as the day is long and it wouldn’t matter from their perspective.)

So how to become part of the Jewish people? Well, the easiest way, as you said, is to be born into the Jewish people. Though what that means is also complicated. For most of Jewish history, the criterion that was adopted was that of matrilineal descent – that is, that if you were born to a Jewish mother, you’re a Jew; if not, not. This had to do with the fact that (until genetic testing) it was impossible to verify paternity, but you could tell who a child’s mother was. Short of matrilineal descent, the only way to become a member of the Jewish people was, as Raya said, to convert – which was an option even from ancient times, as the Book of Ruth suggests.

This said, in modern times people who were still committed to Jewish peoplehood as a criterion, and defined that peoplehood as based on descent, questioned the concept of matrilineal descent. The Reform movement, for example, accepts that people who are born of Jewish fathers but non-Jewish mothers are Jews. Orthodox Jews don’t consider these children to be Jewish. This can get messy, as you can imagine, if, for example, a child from the latter category wants to be married in an Orthodox ceremony, since Orthodox rabbis won’t perform intermarriages – and from their perspective a Jew is marrying a non-Jew.

But an additional question is out there, which is to say: who gets to make the rules about who gets to be a Jew? Traditionally, it’s been the rabbinic authorities, who have made it about descent and peoplehood: and that may be the case. But who knows if it has to be?

I’ll leave you with two different examples from the modern world of belonging to a group, silly examples but hopefully illustrative: members of the New York Yankees and great New York restaurants . Obviously, there’s a difference between the two: I can say, until I’m blue in the face, that I’m a member of the Yankees, but that doesn’t mean that I am. There are very clear and universally acknowledged criteria to who gets to be a New York Yankee and who doesn’t. But who decides what is and what isn’t a good New York restaurant? There are certainly bodies that render judgments on these, and they’re important and do have a real effect in the world (if critics give a restaurant a bad rating, it matters), but it’s hard to say that they control what is or isn’t a good restaurant, right?

HALF-REMEMBERED STORIES

In July 2010, we will be rolling out a multi-media exhibition about lost people, lost places, and the quest to reclaim lost memory. In preparation for this exhibit, we've invited 16 young Jews, ages 15 to 25, to blog.